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Monday, June 30, 2014

The Day Pearl Damn-Near Drownded

Late-summer: I’m
14, and my family and various friends and relatives have packed ice, beer, pop,
and varied sandwiches into coolers. We’ve
rented inner-tubes and are stepping into the Rum River to float from one
location to another.

That’s right. We’re floating down the Rum River.

Why? No one knows, really. The adults lash
the beer cooler to their inner tubes, the children scatter about as the current
takes them, and, barring complications, you have a whole day in the sun, butts
bitten by bugs and large curious fish, pleasantly inebriated adults giving you
money for treats later.

I have to assume, looking back, that sunscreen had yet to
be invented, because what came two days after the Rum River Float was always
the Peeling of Dad’s Legs, appendages that only saw the sun on this one day out
of the year. My sister and I sat at his
feet, applying vinegar and competing to see who could coax the largest sheet of
skin from his distressed shins.

It was a hard, mean existence.

And yet, it was a tradition.

The Rum is a rather shallow, slow-moving river; but that
year, there had been a heavy rain the night before our trip. The river
was undoubtedly higher – and faster – than usual.

Not that this would stop us.

The adults lashed their tubes together, the “beer tube”
in the center, the kids divided into various contingencies primarily based on
age, and we set off.

Did I mention that the river was a little high?

We managed to keep the tubes in the center of the river
for most of the day, but eventually one loses track of such things, and I found
myself drifting towards the bank – and perhaps for the first time truly noticed
how many trees were in the water, how many of them had fallen over, their limbs
reaching into the water.

I find myself pushed into a toppled tree.

The water swirls, irritated with my blunder; and I am flipped
over, caught under branches who promise to never let me go.

The inner tube is now around my waist. Upside down,
I find I can’t get out of it. The tree branches hold me under, scratch at
my face and my arms as I fight. I am stuck in the branches, and it occurs
to me, as my lungs start to burn and things began to go black, that I am going
to die in the river.

I am pulled up and out by my hair. It is my
father. The inner tube pops to the surface, I pop to the surface, and I take
a hysterical and searing lung-full of air.

My eyes open to my friend Tammy bobbing violently in her
tube, one hand clutching a Diet Rite , the other gripping the end of my Dad’s
t-shirt.

The other kids get a big kick out of it, of course, as I
launch myself down the swollen river in pursuit of the inner tube that had just
conspired to kill me, and I secretly vow, in the way that only a teenage girl
can, that I will have nothing to do with the upcoming Peeling of Dad’s
Legs.

That brought back memories of our families and friends riding tubes down the Delaware. The first year there were no rules about bringing alcohol, but the following year, because of a drowning, the "no alcohol" law was put in place. Unfortunately, it takes a tragedy to make people think.

Going down the river in a tube is such a wonderful summertime thing to do and I am sorry you had such a bad experience.

We used to use inner tubes as water toys at the nearby little river and one day I did the same thing to myself as that tree did to you. Somehow I got myself righted; I'm not sure how, and no one else noticed what had happened. I don't like to remember it - brrrr.

I nearly drownded, too, when I was about 7 or 8 yrs old. I was playing around a pool pushing an inner tube with a ball in it back and forth across the pool. I pushed it too hard once and it bounced off the wall and began drifting away. I leaned over, stretching my arms, a little further, almost there...splash! I fell into the deep end. I did not know how to swim. I remember looking up through the water and could see the sun all warped though the water. The sound the water made in my ears is what haunts me the most. As I stared up through the water I suddenly saw a figure wiggling like a snake without being in the water yet. Then it was there grabbing me...it was my dad. I came out coughing and sputtering. My dad, my heero, scolded me for having fallen in as he had told me to stay away from the edge.

I found myself wondering why the adults were drinking watered-down beer when there was rum. This river must flow through the Big Rock Candy Mountains (adult version) where whiskey flows from springs.

Glad you're okay. When in college, I was caught upside down in a kayak under a tree in the Haw River and because of the branches couldn't roll and thought for sure I was dead. I survived, but it was winter and the only thing bothering me more than the lack of air was how cold the water was on my face (I was wearing a wetsuit).